The evolution of the music industry with the spread of the Internet. The full paper is available here: https://www.academia.edu/359318/The_recording_industry_and_grassroots_marketing_from_street_teams_to_flash_mobs
New media have changed the relationship between the recording industry and fans. TheInternet allows fans to share copyrighted music in p2p and Web 2.0 platforms. The
recording industry has reacted mainly with ‘prohibitionist’ strategies, while cultural scholarsargue that a ‘collaborationist’ approach is needed with the aim of creating an ‘affectiveeconomy’. In this paper, I describe the strategies of the major labels to create a fanbase of
grassroots promoters. During an ethnographic research project, I identified different forms
of grassroots marketing (‘street team’, ‘flash mob’, and ‘mission’). I argue that labels try toharness ‘participative stardom’: a ‘music star’ is created thanks to transmedia strategies
(online presence and TV appearances during media events and talent shows), then labelsoutsource promotional activities to fans, rewarding them with branded products and theopportunity to meet artists.
1. Dancing in the Stardom
Recording Industry and Grassroots Marketing
Agnese Vellar
Department of Social Sciences - Università di Torino
ESA - Sociology of Culture Conference
Università Bocconi, 8 October 2010
2. new markets
2
Recording industry in the Web 2.0
Major
labels
Indie
labels
digital distribution
e-commerce
participatory cultures
file
sharing
networked technologies
3. «Music How, When, Where You Want It.
But Not Without Addressing Piracy»
Diversify! Educate and Punish!
New way to distribute music.
2009: 27% of the music industries
revenues come from digital channels
“Graduated response approach”
(deals with ISP).
Legal battle against file sharing
services and p2p users.
à-la-carte
download model
centralized platform
for HQ music videos
ad-supported
services
handset makers
(IFPI Report, 2010)
4. 4
Affective economies
Swedish indie music
transnational audience
(Baym & Burnett, 2009)
grassroots
marketing
Jarvis Cocker
indie rock
(Beer, 2008)
Li Yuchun
pop national idol
(Yang, 2009)
Rate, tag, translate, MP3 Blog,
distribute bootlegs
Fans as promoters:
social and cultural rewards
Talent show
promotional packages
charity foundation
anti-piracy campagin
Live performances Networked collectivismMySpace profile
Tori Amos
songrwiter
(Farrugia & Gobatto, 2010)
Pop music Indie music
(Jenkins, 2006)
5. Ethnographic research
construct a
celebrity persona!
harness the free
work of fans!
Shakira
(Colombian)
Marco Mengoni
(Italian)
Lady Gaga
(US)
Italian fan base of grasroots promoters
9. @perezhilton i wish i had been there, you are
a wonderful friend, only you would party all
night/free cuba in the morning
Lady Gaga: queen of social media
My Daddy had open heart surgery today.
And after long hours, and lots of tears, they
healed his broken heart, and mine.
Speechless.
Performance of the intimate
self to reduce social distance
videomessages
Happy 4th of July little monsters! I can smell
you from backstage. Lipstick, whiskey, and
the rat pack. F*ck I love AC. X Mother
Monster
fan video and pictures
engage
11. Street team portal
Group leader
coordinates the local team
(composed by 2 to 10
streetteamer).
Moderator
moderate the public forum,
coordinate the local teams
and share the flyers.
Professional Staff: «Our motto is “Fan just wanna have fun”. Our aim is to let
fans participate in the carrier of their favourite artists to knock down the wall
that in the past keep separate recording industry and fans.»
12. Mengoni: flashmob
«In every city. In every villages. All over the world. You too. All Me
too. Everyone together. Let’s dance together»
online audience online performances & offline performance live audience
13. Shakira: Waka Waka dance
«Every child in the world should have access to an education. This
time dance with me for this one goal. […] 1 Song, 1 dance, 1 goal».
online audience online performances & offline performance live audience
15. Pop music cultures in the Web 2.0
new media company:
harness
“collective intelligence”
collaborative construction of
shared knowledge
stardom recording industry
transmedia music star:
sport event
talent show
social media
loyal
consumers
grasroots performance
(online and offline)
performative
cunsumption
harnessing
“participative stardom”
New media changed the relationship between the recording industry and fans. In fact, networked technologies allow fans to share copyrighted music in p2p networks and social media. The majors reacted mainly with “prohibitionist” strategies, while cultural scholars argue that industry should adopt “collaborationist” approach to create an “affective economy” (Condry 2004, Jenkins 2006, Varnelis 2009). Also empirical research demonstrated that both indie labels and pop artists can benefit from “fan labor” (Baym and Burnett 2009, Beer 2008, Yang 2009).
In this paper, I describe the strategies of the Italian pop music industry to create a fanbase of grassroot promoters. I’ve conducted an ethnographic research in a multi-sited field. Observing social interactions in professional web portals and analyzing data (textual messages and video) collected from social network sites (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook), I’ve identified different forms of grassroots marketing. Labels outsource promotional activities to fans organizing “street team” (i.e., groups of fans that distribute flyers), “flashmob” (i.e., collective performances in public spaces) and “contest” (i.e., challenge to create music video, to customise the online self with branded products, …). Why fans work for free? I argue that recording industry try to harness “performative stardom”. First of all stardom is created thanks to cross-media strategies. “Star-making Tv” as talent shows engage consumers in parasocial relationships with artists. This relationship is reinforced thanks to fan-artist interaction through social network sites and videochats. Finally labels stimulate fans promotional performances through “challenges” and “missions” that are rewarded with branded products and the opportunity to meet artists.
ABSTRACT
Social Network Sites (SNS) like Twitter are web based services that exemplify the hybrid and cross-cultural nature of today's multilingual Internet. Data that are shared in SNS are searchable, replicable, persistent and scalable. Therefore, researchers have a great amount of multimedia data available that are produced in a nondirective way. Furthermore, a worldwide population has adopted SNS; therefore they have become an interesting research field for the investigation of crosscultural communications. Since the 1990s studies on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) applied discourse analysis to described how individuals negotiate their identities with online social groups and the functionalities of mediated technologies. However, SNS are multimedia environments that emerge form the negotiation between designers (who built the interfaces) and the everyday practices of users (who customize them). The concept of visual capital, a contextualisation of Bourdieu's cultural capital in the realm of visual and digital media (Parks 2002, Nakamura 2008), can be adopted to outline social and cultural differences related to access and use of (strongly graphical) digital media. Therefore, CMC research has to merge with Visual Cultural Studies to investigate how visual capital is embodied in online profiles to express membership to a (sub)culture. In fact, the activity of profile customization, through images and graphics, implies different tastes, skills and practices. Which kinds of skills emerge from these practices? Do users integrate the professional aesthetic of the SNS designer? Do counter(visual)cultures based on different geographical or linguistic affiliation emerge?
Early studies on Twitter analyzed discursive and networking practices; with this paper instead, we propose to turn the focus on how users negotiate their visual identity within the broader “Twitterverse” (the culture constructed by the adoption of Twitter). We thus propose a methodology that combines the analysis of visual profiles and “visual elicitation” online interviews. Through the “trending topics” feature we collected 1,500 Twitter profiles of three different geographical affiliation: Worldwide, United States and Italy. We analyzed avatars and backgrounds with NVivo8 categorizing visual data based on subject, source, techniques and linguistic affiliation of the users to define a typology of visual cultures on Twitter. We also considered how these practices embody web-specific skills, such as reconfiguration and remediation (Lievrouw 2009), and what kind of literacies people develop through them (Livingstone 2004). In our future work we will conduct “visual elicitation” online interviews with Italian users; we will use chat services to ask the interviewer to comment upon visual profiles (his own and others). The aim will be to investigate the reflexive process of the visual identity construction and the identification/differentiation with different visual cultures in a multilingual platform.
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